Seven Years

by Peter Stamm, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann (Other Press; $15.95)

With a patient and impressive commitment to realism, this Swiss novel follows the course of a complicated, troubled marriage. Through a series of flashbacks, the narrator, an architect named Alex, lays out the story of his courtship of and marriage to the beautiful, humorless Sonia and his simultaneous, inexplicable relationship with an unattractive, devoutly Catholic Polish woman named Ivona, who is hopelessly in love with him. “You are what you love, not who loves you,” Alex says at one point, and the words hang heavily over this bleak triangle. Though Stamm pulls off a quietly spectacular plot twist halfway through the book, he never loses sight of the quotidian things that erode or transform relationships over time: an oddly personal disagreement about the merits of “Rain Man,” or the “piles of romance novels, Christian manuals, and Polish magazines” that crowd a lover’s apartment. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the April 4, 2011, issue.

Growing up in an apocalyptic cult wasn’t nearly as hard as leaving it.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.